Ayşe Tekşen
Waiting Nowhere
Everything is livedand killed here by my side.Here with me rise the dead ofthe impossible allegiances,the impossibility ofour arrivals andof our risings.We ask ourselveshow will we rise—again?And again, how can wecontinue our walk onthis desert that was oncecalled a black rose garden;full of different shades of blackand thorns and the darkestlivelihood imaginedin its most lively setting?Sitting on an ice-castbronze throne,the one with no namecalls me inwhispers and yells.He whispers in yellsand calls my namewhich is not my namethis time, but a song—a song I likeand don’t likeat different times.He tells me whatlife is all about.A clash, a crush,a bruise, a cry,he says,toward nowhere,nowhere at all.And he waits. Ayşe Tekşen lives in Ankara, Turkey where she works as a research assistant at the Department of Foreign Language Education, Middle East Technical University. Her short stories and poems have been included in Gravel, After the Pause, The Write Launch, Uut Poetry, The Fiction Pool, What Rough Beast, Scarlet Leaf Review, Seshat Literary Magazine, Neologism Poetry Journal, Anapest, Red Weather, Ohio Edit, SWWIM Every Day, The Paragon Journal, and Arcturus. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Constellations, Jaffat El Aqlam, the Same, Willow Literary Magazine, and Slink Chunk Press.
Everything is livedand killed here by my side.Here with me rise the dead ofthe impossible allegiances,the impossibility ofour arrivals andof our risings.We ask ourselveshow will we rise—again?And again, how can wecontinue our walk onthis desert that was oncecalled a black rose garden;full of different shades of blackand thorns and the darkestlivelihood imaginedin its most lively setting?Sitting on an ice-castbronze throne,the one with no namecalls me inwhispers and yells.He whispers in yellsand calls my namewhich is not my namethis time, but a song—a song I likeand don’t likeat different times.He tells me whatlife is all about.A clash, a crush,a bruise, a cry,he says,toward nowhere,nowhere at all.And he waits. Ayşe Tekşen lives in Ankara, Turkey where she works as a research assistant at the Department of Foreign Language Education, Middle East Technical University. Her short stories and poems have been included in Gravel, After the Pause, The Write Launch, Uut Poetry, The Fiction Pool, What Rough Beast, Scarlet Leaf Review, Seshat Literary Magazine, Neologism Poetry Journal, Anapest, Red Weather, Ohio Edit, SWWIM Every Day, The Paragon Journal, and Arcturus. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Constellations, Jaffat El Aqlam, the Same, Willow Literary Magazine, and Slink Chunk Press.